


First Response

by architeuthis



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe, The Authority, WildStorm
Genre: Action/Adventure, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, DCEU Fanworks Exchange Treat, Getting Together, M/M, Minor Character Death, Origin Story, Project Cadmus, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 08:50:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8280043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: In the wake of the battle with Doomsday, a man in black prowls the streets of Metropolis, righting wrongs and protecting the innocent. It's awkward.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/gifts).



> SO I HEARD YOU LIKE ORIGIN STORIES. Here's about five of them.
> 
> This story makes reference to something that happens in the Ultimate Edition of BvS, but not the theatrical cut. As an outsider perspective on those events, it is probably readable even if you're only familiar with the theatrical cut.

His first memory of Apollo is as a body in a chemical bath, rigid with what was probably agony. He'd been as glassily transparent as some deep-sea creature, except for the new organs that pulsed with stored light. After that there are gaps and flickers; before that there is nothing. But he remembers Apollo breaking the surface at last, and the fluid coursing down the curve of his skull, his shoulders, his arms; he remembers Apollo pausing before being led away, to extend a hand to him and punch the front glass of the tank.

No, that's wrong. _Apollo_ had been in a tank, _he_ had been on a table, surrounded by the whir of the surgical arms that were reassembling his body for the third time. But Apollo punches the glass again, and this time it shatters. He hooks his fingers over the jagged edge and rips the front off the stasis tube.

The Midnighter gasps in hot air and spasms against his bonds. Apollo's mouth is moving. He snaps the shackles on the Midnighter's wrists and neck; his fingers feel like branding irons.

The fight computer comes up first and begins engineering Apollo's death. They are in a long room containing thirty-eight cryogenic stasis units, plus the one Apollo is freeing the Midnighter from and the one to its right, which is a heap of charred circuitry and slag. The tank at the end of the room is probably refrigerant. That piece of debris at Apollo's feet will, when thrown, fly along a curved path like a frisbee. Thrown hard enough, it will knock loose a pipe on the refrigerant tank, the room will flood, and the cold will weaken Apollo, enabling the Midnighter to snap his—

His default target exceptions list loads about a microsecond later and halts all Apollo scenarios before he has finished projecting the first one. Auxiliary senses come online next, each in their turn, and the world expands for him in layers, bigger and deeper and richer every moment. There's a klaxon sounding somewhere, footfalls, agitation, running water, gunfire, some kind of roar, organic particulates in the air. A thunderous impact far overhead rattles the equipment and his teeth. The dim reddish lighting and generally poor wattage suggest backup power. He's been EMPed recently; either Apollo's tube shorted badly, or it just wasn't up to holding him on reduced electricity.

Language is nonessential, and is one of the last faculties to return.

"—popsicle," Apollo concludes, tossing away the second wrist shackle. He's opaque these days, though completely without pigment; it requires one of the Midnighter's panoply of additional senses to see that he's at about two percent maximum charge. Not enough to deal with whatever's happening upstairs. The refrigerant wouldn't have been necessary. "Status?"

"Nominal," the Midnighter says, in a voice that sounds like a mile of hard road. Apollo grins, but sags against the stasis tube, and the Midnighter clambers out of it just to catch him before he slips to the floor.

He's a little below his customary body temperature, about an even forty Celsius, but he might as well be on fire the way his hands feel, his sides when the Midnighter grabs him, the arm he hooks around the Midnighter's neck for support. These tubes must have a wake-up cycle that returns the occupant gently to the temperature of a living being, but the Midnighter is doing it the hard way, with bloodflow and metabolic heat. While his artificial muscles and re-engineered organs are sending him polite diagnostic alerts about this, his skin, the most human part of him left, announces the situation to him in the animal language of pain. Frost shivers from his coat in the humid air, and his corneas mist over between blinks.

"Looks like the same facility we were in when ..." he begins, and gestures with his free hand rather than finish the sentence. Strictly speaking, he should probably wait for the order to move out, but he hauls Apollo toward the door and Apollo doesn't protest.

"What tipped you off?" says Apollo instead, perusing the other stasis tubes as they pass them. Some are empty; one contains a young man with his right arm missing below the elbow. The rest house half-finished things: hybrid creatures and unoptimized conglomerations of organs and limbs that don't look like they could survive and probably shouldn't even if they can. Prototypes. It's not _only_ familiar from what they saw when they broke in here, though the lab that made the two of them had been as outlandish a crossbreed as any of these creatures. All of this equipment at least looks like it's probably from Earth.

There are footsteps passing in the hall; the Midnighter puts his hand on the warm metal of the door when they reach it, and waits for the sounds to recede. Humans, or at least human-sized bipeds, but also at least two things that are much larger and have more legs. They pass by the door quickly and without hesitation. So: they don't know anything's gone wrong in the prison-slash-rejects gallery. Good. He looks at Apollo, who is sagging against his shoulder, eyes half-lidded.

"How fast does your hair grow?"

"My—what?" Apollo touches it like this is the first time it's occurred to him that he _has_ hair. The Midnighter has a familiar vision of his own black glove against the white of it, of his fingers running through it like a comb. He looks at the controls for the door again.

"Trying to figure out how long we've been under. My hair hasn't grown, yours is six or eight inches longer. Except your beard hasn't—"

"I can't grow a beard."

"Oh." Apollo also doesn't have a stomach. There's no reason for _this_ to strike the Midnighter as strange. "So you've been fighting the cryostasis, keeping some of your metabolic processes running. Probably why you're so depleted. The length of your hair may tell us something." Maybe he could never grow a beard before, either. They've never talked about whether he remembers his old life.

"It took a couple of months to get around an inch long after I got out of the vat, which I guess is normal."

"Meaning they've had probably twelve to sixteen months to improve on the systems that killed the rest of our team, and they've had their remains to study. Such as they were. Plus whatever they could get from the two of us without vivisecting us."

Apollo's sagging head jerks up. "You don't think...."

"They didn't sell us or trade us, so they want us, probably to suborn or reverse engineer."

"Well, that's horrible," Apollo says, and closes his eyes. "If I had a charge, I could just tunnel us out of here."

"But you don't. Conserve what you have. If there's trouble and I drop you, stay down. Ready?"

He reaches for the door controls without waiting for confirmation, but Apollo stops him. The Midnighter is faster, but once he allows Apollo's hand to close around his wrist, there's no getting away until Apollo decides to release him or runs out of juice.

"You're not my bodyguard."

"No, I'm your teammate. At the moment I'm at nearly full capability, and you aren't."

"Technically, I'm your commander."

"Which is why I'm doing everything in my power to keep you alive."

Apollo's face tightens; he drops his gaze and, a moment later, relaxes his grip. The Midnighter presses a likely-looking button and the door retracts with a sigh, affording them a view of the redly translucent membrane that stretches across the outside of the doorway.

"Ah," Apollo says after a moment. "Hm."

"Damn." The Midnighter puts his hand on the membrane, though he doesn't have to touch it to know that it's living tissue. It's firm, taut, warm, maybe a quarter inch thick. The same temperature the door was—the _reason_ the door was warm. Probably also the reason for the humidity, for the organic matter in the air. It isn't climate control, it's _homeostasis_. He tries to get a grip on it, to pull it down or to the side, but it's too tight across the door for him to do that without tearing it. The squiggle of a blood vessel pounds under his palm. "Explains why they don't check this room. You can't see the door."

"The biological reactor," Apollo says slowly. "Did it ... get loose?"

"Baby's all grown up, one way or another." The Midnighter presses again with his stiff fingers, calibrating for the precise give of the wall of meat. "Close your mouth, this is going to spray."

"Wait, I've got it." A familiar glow throws the contours of Apollo's face into sudden relief; in a heartbeat it's so bright that, at this proximity, the Midnighter has to look away and squint.

"Apollo—" he begins, but before he can get another word out he hears the razor-edged hum of Apollo's ocular plasma projection, and a wave of scorching air strikes his face like a slap. It lasts three seconds. The heat required to burn probably twenty pounds of flesh down to ash in that time is stupendous; the smell briefly stuns the Midnighter's nose into submission.

"Damn it, what part of 'conserve' don't you—" he says hoarsely. The heat has left the skin of his face dry and tight.

"If we're lucky, I cauterized enough nerves that if it can feel that, it can't feel it very _well_." Apollo is at just above one percent charge, and leaning even more heavily on the Midnighter. His skin has cooled a degree just in the time they've been talking; it's impossible not to notice, with him pressed all along the Midnighter's side.

"Point taken." He drags Apollo through the smoking hole and into the corridor.

The membrane is not a curtain but a tube, like a gigantic intestine, which covers the walls and ceilings and muffles their footfalls. Out here the emergency lights are even dimmer and redder, filtered through a layer of tissue. The Midnighter's nose wakes up slowly, and he's not pleased about the smells in this place now that he knows he's inside a giant organism. The klaxons are clearer: the footfalls from earlier had been headed their way. He steers Apollo in the opposite direction.

This hallway doesn't seem familiar, but the only way to be sure of that would be to strip the walls bare. All of his guesses about the layout of this structure assume it is mostly metal and concrete, not living upholstery, and that sound and air travel through it in particular ways; his models don't hold up, and infrared data is useless. Something in the back of his mind—something Henry Bendix installed there—cooks away at the math, but it'll be a while before he has results. What he knows for sure is that they're underground, and that it's not as simple as finding a window and jumping out. He takes turns at random, just to keep them moving, looking for an elevator or, better yet, an emergency stairway.

Apollo's a dead weight but he's warm and breathing. He makes a low noise every once in a while, which the Midnighter at first takes for a sign of discomfort. No, he's heard that before, in a different context; it's the sound Apollo makes at night when he's just about to fall asleep, or when unexpectedly woken. The Midnighter has heard it a hundred times, in the dark, from a few bunks over. One time he provoked it, nudging Apollo awake during a sleep deprivation trial. He can _feel_ it now, the quick flexing of Apollo's ribs, the vibration that passes into his body from Apollo's.

He's not sure what happens when Apollo hits zero charge. Hibernation? Death?

No. He refuses.

They aren't the first to have cut themselves in or out of somewhere. He glances through open doors and ragged, scar-edged flaps of tissue, into labs and storage rooms; they look ransacked, disused. Between them are puckers in the membrane that suggest still-hidden doors. This is bullshit. They could have walked past a dozen escape routes without realizing it. He's half ready to suggest finding a power outlet for Apollo to lick just in case he can get a charge that way, when he brushes aside a hanging curtain of skin to reveal a staircase glyph on the door behind it.

It's a utility stairwell like any other, with concrete walls and metal treads. If it runs the full height of this structure, they're ten storeys from the top of a fifteen-storey facility. He remembers the ceiling of the top floor being about fifty feet down through the smooth vertical tunnel Lamplight had cut into the earth. Apollo had had to carry Crow Jane down, then come back for the Midnighter. Amaze had just jumped, Stalker had climbed headfirst down the sheer surface while Impetus sprinted down it, and Lamplight had wafted along behind them all like a ghost.

The top floors had been mostly empty. Build big and then grow to fill it. They'd had to get five storeys in before things started getting weird. The silent guards, in suits that concealed their twisted bodies: multiple limbs in one sleeve, multiple faces in one head. The reactor chamber, where everything had gone completely and finally wrong.

Just the two of them now. Up seems likelier to offer an exit than down does. Things have gotten quiet up there, no more klaxons, no more roaring or unusual electromagnetic activity, which is not reassuring. The Midnighter mounts the stairs. Apollo is limp at his side, possibly unconscious.

They've ascended about three floors when another door opens another two storeys up, and creatures begin piling onto the landing. They're mostly spindly, smaller than human-sized, with faces that suggest both simians and insects; the fingerprint of whoever designed the prototypes in the rejects gallery is all over them. A couple are larger, burlier, and a single cat-sized one rides on another's shoulder. Through the open door, the Midnighter can make out a shape too large to enter the stairwell, something with thick, elephantine limbs—he makes an educated guess that this is the quadruped he heard earlier, or at least has the same model number.

There's no way to miss Apollo and the Midnighter. One of the spindly ones points at them over the railing, and the creatures turn their red eyes downward. There's no outcry, but the little horns on all of them light up, and there's a burst of brain activity in the whole group that suggests telepathy. The creature out in the hall sticks its big tusked head in. Some of them show their teeth. Just great.

The Midnighter dashes up the last few stairs of the flight they're on and yanks open the door at the next landing, but their exit is blocked by an untorn stretch of membrane. The creatures are already clattering down the stairs to meet them. Ah, fuck it. They might as well do this here as in the hallway. The Midnighter deposits Apollo against the wall, as gently as he has time for, then vaults the railing.

The creature in the lead is still one floor up, but it will be directly across from him in a moment. He leaps for the opposite rail, catches it, and hangs, swinging: forward, back, forward. In this stairwell, with all of its concrete and metal, his environmental models all work, and second by second he's learning how these creatures' bodies operate better than they do. Back. This time he flexes his whole body into it. Momentum and raw strength carry him up and over the rail, an arch of carbon fiber and organic circuitry and the last few scraps of a human man.

His boots enter a particular volume of air at the same instant the head of the first creature does. The bones of its skull shatter very satisfyingly against the wall, and the Midnighter lands lightly on his feet. The other creatures' collective first reaction is not to press the attack but to recoil, which is interesting. The more he learns, the more data he feeds into his fight computer, the more possibilities bloom around them. He gets in there and starts pruning them back to the outcomes he likes.

The spindly ones are frail and respond well to elbows and knees. He can tell the burly ones are tougher—not Apollo-tough but maybe a little tougher than him—even before the first one reaches him, so he lets it hit one of its buddies instead. Both of them are so upset by this that the Midnighter writes them off for the time being to concentrate on the next three creatures. An unpleasant sensation has started up in his head, a hot rashy scrabbling like someone trying to prise his mind open with itchy thistle claws. It coincides with a sharp increase in neurological activity in the little cat-sized creature, and ends abruptly when he kicks that creature off its ride's shoulder and into the wall. While he's at it, he throws the ride over the railing, to whatever awaits it at the end of a nine-storey drop onto concrete.

He's just squaring off with the last one when his burly friend stops cuddling its fallen compatriot and comes at him from the back. It's not his _best_ option, but he's got to see if it works again, so he lunges out of the way and, sure enough, it barrels into the last creature and the two of them go down together. They'd tumble all the way down to the landing where Apollo still lies slumped against the wall, but one of them catches the stair rail and they begin to disentangle. Oh, it's his favorite burly; he can tell from the glare.

"The smart ones are thinking about escape plans by this point," he says. It rips off the length of handrail it's holding. He's got eight seconds before it reaches him again, and he allots four of them to selecting the funniest way to handle this.

At around three seconds to go, he has just about figured out how to make it crush the unconscious but still-living cat-sized creature. His train of thought is interrupted when someone new squeezes past the tusked thing and onto the landing above them, and shouts down, "Brothers, no! Cease your fighting!"

"You're kidding," the Midnighter says, but looks up. It's one of the spindly ones, approximately. This one has large hooked horns, and barbels on either side of its mouth that suggest a Fu Manchu mustache. Unlike all the others, it's wearing clothes—probably recovered from the barracks, because it looks like an alien lab tech. Sounds male, but these things don't seem to have sex organs, so who knows. Actually, what it sounds like is a burnt-out English professor, which is quite a comparison for a man whose current life began on a steel table to make. Something to wonder about later.

The burly is still coming. The Midnighter dodges the swing of its impromptu club, catches it on the follow through, then puts his foot on the burly's face and sends it ass-over-horns back down the stairs, into the other one from which it just disengaged. It loses its grip on its weapon, meaning the Midnighter now has a javelin, which he turns and launches smoothly at the English professor.

It completes half of its flight path, then stops dead in midair. All of the scenarios the fight computer had spun around the new arrival collapse instantly under the weight of this new data; a few fractions of a second later, new ones explode from it like fireworks, filling the stairwell with probabilities and trajectories.

While the new arrival is still fully focused on the floating length of handrail, the Midnighter scoops up the cat-sized creature and tosses it down the center of the stairwell, then starts up the stairs. There's a moment of visible panic and confusion; the handrail wobbles, drops, stabilizes, then drops again as the new creature tries to shift its telekinetic grip. It gets hold of the cat-sized thing before it hits the bottom floor, and yanks it back up past the height from which it was thrown. Just as the professor is reaching for it with its actual hands, the Midnighter rounds the last turn between them and himself and yanks the professor back from the railing in a choke hold.

"I'd like you to answer some questions," he says into what he takes to be its ear. It feels bony and fragile against its chest; he gives it a squeeze so that it knows exactly what it's dealing with, then loosens up enough for it to talk.

"Brother, I have no desire to fight you."

"That's not how I'd describe what you're doing anyway."

The creature makes a noise in its throat. "That is one of the reasons. Please let me put this genome down safely."

"Genome?"

"G-gnome," it repeats, clipping the syllables off precisely. "May I take that as your assent?"

When the Midnighter doesn't say _no_ , it floats the unconscious creature along a wobbling path that takes it back to the safe side of the railing and then down, gently, to the floor at their feet. Above them, the large one with the tusks has stopped trying to get into the stairwell and is just watching, holding the doorframe with one of its handlike forefeet; below them, the Midnighter's personal favorite and that other one it's collided with twice now have regained their feet again and are watching with anger and trepidation, respectively. Everyone else is down or dead. Still farther down the staircase, Apollo lies where the Midnighter left him, though his eyes are half-open and seem to be tracking the action.

"Now," the professor says. "How may I accommodate you."

"Is whatever I heard going on a rampage earlier inside this facility, or on the surface?"

"The latter. We have no visibility there and cannot ascertain much, but it is not one of us and did not originate here. Our other brothers thought you had something to do with it, but it seems to be gone now."

"'Our'?"

"Yours and mine."

"Keep going."

"As another being created by human tampering and hubris, what are you but our brother?"

"I can think of some options."

"I could call you our liberator, if you prefer," it says, which brings the Midnighter up short.

The seven of them killed a significant number of human personnel in the course of infiltrating this facility and breaching the reactor chamber, before its defenses caught them. If Apollo hadn't been too floored by the deaths of Amaze and Stalker to act, and if the Midnighter hadn't appointed himself to deal with him, both of them would have gone into the same soup of body parts as the rest of the team. They had made a credible attempt to escape, but there had still been enough humans up and operating to stun both of them and put them on ice. Enough living personnel to prevent the sort of total operational collapse that leads to unchecked tissue growth and science experiments roaming the halls wearing pocket protectors. Unless....

" _You_ didn't think I had anything to do with whatever's happening topside," he says.

"No. I am much older than most of our brothers. I was here when you and your compatriots showed us how to free ourselves."

* * *

It introduces itself as Dubbilex and its fellow creatures as genomorphs once he, eventually, lets it go. While the others collect their dead and wounded, the two of them swap information: the location of the hall of failed prototypes in exchange for the route out. Every time the Midnighter's special friend looks at him a little too resentfully, its horns and Dubbilex's both glow, and their brains surge with the strange activity that marks telepathy.

"If we had known you were still here and alive, we would have woken you ourselves," Dubbilex says, leading them back the way they came and then farther, down to the lowest level of the facility.

"So you wouldn't know anything about a human in a stasis tube next to ours. Male, baseline, teens, missing part of an arm."

"This is the first we have learned of him."

"Do what you can for him."

"Of course, brother."

The meat wallpaper doesn't extend to the bottom floor. It's damp down here, which does not inspire confidence, but the echoes are blessedly normal, and it's easier to identify the spoked shape of the floor plan when none of the doors or turnings are concealed. Dubbilex leads them along the curve of the outermost ring, a broad space with a high-traction floor. The inner wall reads _PROJECT CADMUS SUBLEVEL A_ and the outer features a row of submersible maintenance and charging bays. It's a graveyard: each of the subs has been either smashed or dismantled.

"Damn it," the Midnighter says under his breath, when an intact sub fails to present itself before Dubbilex reaches the airlock. Apollo groans against his shoulder; he can't really tell if that indicates consciousness or not.

Dubbilex's face is immobile, but the Midnighter fucking knows sadistic enjoyment when he sees it. "We have no desire for contact with the outside world, so these vehicles are of no use to us," it says, keying open the airlock door.

"Very poetic," the Midnighter says, and drags Apollo through.

"Be glad we did not completely destroy this exit as we did with the ones at the surface. Our isolation from humanity ensures the safety of the Mother Reactor and is of paramount importance to us."

"Right."

"It is my hope that you will think of this place as a home to yourself and every person of our kind who longs for freedom, and remember that we will always be grateful to you for showing us the way to it," Dubbilex says, standing framed in the doorway. "But don't come back."

The doors hiss shut, and a canned voice announces the beginning of the airlock cycle. The Midnighter looks down at Apollo. A little under one percent charge.

"Ready?"

"Mm," Apollo says, and rests his forehead against the Midnighter's jaw. The Midnighter holds perfectly still as murky water rises around them.

* * *

They are both heavier than water and the Midnighter is wearing a calf-length leather coat: it's not a fun swim. First several minutes of groping along an upward-slanting stone tunnel that the Midnighter feels could very easily have been a sealed and pressurized part of the Cadmus facility, then a straight ascent toward a surface only slightly brighter than the depths. A strong current tries to drag them off course.

When they hit air, Apollo spits water and gasps for a breath he doesn't need. The Midnighter finds himself doing it too, and he's less of an organism than Apollo is; he's not sure how much more of the original man Bendix would've had to carve out to excise that reflex. Apollo subsides until just his face is above the water, and closes his eyes; his hair fans out around his head like the ghosts of seaweed.

The Midnighter shoves him higher in the water and swats his cheek until he opens his eyes again. "Stay with me. Can you get in the air?"

"Don't know."

"Try."

"Mm."

On his first attempt, he succeeds only in pushing the Midnighter under the water. It seems to wake Apollo up a little, at least. "Sorry! Oh God, I'm sorry, it's a reflex."

"Whatever," the Midnighter says, pulling the front of his cowl away from his face to let water run from under it. "I saw your propulsion organs engage for a second. Try again."

Attempt number two starts slower, and Apollo takes his hands off the Midnighter's shoulders first. The foreign organs in Apollo's chest and abdomen and the cores of his bones glow in the Midnighter's enhanced vision; Apollo flexes his shoulders and throws his head back, and light rises from his skin. During flight, he interacts with spacetime in a way the Midnighter can't perceive directly, but can feel as a sudden turbulence in the water around them, just before Apollo leaps into the air like a stone from a catapult.

He falters once and plummets toward the water, a stone again for a moment, but he catches himself in short order and streaks away, up through the cloud cover and out of sight. The Midnighter lets his breath out, and hopes.

For now, he takes stock. It's night, it's chilly, there's a lot of garbage in the air. Not organic particles like down below, but dust, rock, ash. He's floating in a river, bordered on either side by bright cities. That's new. The island is to his left, burning, and he swims for it.

It's definitely the same island Lamplight tunneled them into those months ago, but it's been through some hard times since he last set foot on it, and those hard times look to have been in the last couple of hours. There's a crater, dotted with fires; the Midnighter would bet the particulates he's inhaling are impact ejecta. He skids down the slope and digs at one of the unmistakable stitchmarks in the ground until he pulls free a rubber bullet. Farther along he finds a footprint, clear but misshapen and three feet long, and then the long glassy streak of a beam weapon applied to rock. All right. It's been an exciting evening for everyone.

He's just picking up a big ragged scrap of grey skin from the ground when Apollo returns, floating down to him from the sky. Full charge. He burns like a star in all of the Midnighter's senses. The trip has dried his hair and it's wild around his head; an optical side effect of his powers bends his light into a halo.

Of course he's beautiful. He's a preternaturally fit man ablaze with stolen light, descending toward the Midnighter from a black sky. He's just ... he's _so_ beautiful.

"What, more of that stuff?" he says, touching down gently.

"Different stuff. Cadmus' tech is less biochemically unusual than you are, this is more. Long hair is a good look on you," the Midnighter adds without thinking.

"Yeah?" Apollo grins and touches his hair again, the way he did down in the facility. All right, too much; the Midnighter has to turn away.

"How far did you have to go to hit daylight?" he asks, to distract himself.

"I'm not sure. Straight up until I was out of the Earth's shadow."

"Huh. Wouldn't have expected that to work."

"Because it would've put me in vacuum?" says Apollo, with a challenge in his voice that pulls the Midnighter back around.

"I didn't know you could do that. Does _Bendix_ know you can do that?"

"I wasn't sure either," Apollo says, abashed now. "I kept a few things under my hat during testing. Hey, I've got another surprise for you." He points at the south bank of the river. "Metropolis." North. "Gotham."

"What? The briefing had us in a ... rogue state," the Midnighter says, hearing for the first time how unsatisfactory that is.

"The Rogue States of America?"

"Why does Stryker's Island have a genetics lab under it, and what is Bendix doing using us to perform 'holding actions' against U.S. corporate and/or military installations?"

"I bet you have a theory and I'm going to hate it."

The Midnighter tosses down the scrap of flesh in his hand and sighs. "We don't exist. Bendix drops us here on a foggy night so we can't tell where we are. Mass registers keep our teleport fobs from pulling us out unless one of us is carrying the reactor." He ticks facts off on his fingers as he goes. "That was the objective all along. No rogue state, no warning shot across the bow, no making the world a finer place. If we fail, we were useless anyway and we can't be traced back to Bendix. If we succeed, he's got the foundation for generation two, and probably scraps us because we've outlived our purpose."

"God, I hate it even more than I was expecting."

"Any insight about this?" The Midnighter gestures at their surroundings.

"Some. Metropolis was hit too, and the Gotham docks—there are two superhumans and some sort of large, dead humanoid there. About the right size to have left that," Apollo says, pointing at the footprint. "It looks like whatever happened, it started in downtown Metropolis and moved across the river to Gotham by way of space. Unusual radiation everywhere, including what might've been a nuclear detonation high in the thermosphere."

"Huh." The Midnighter puts his hands in his pockets and considers. Apollo is a little easier to take when he's standing on the ground like a human being and his halo isn't up, but his white uniform and the arabesques his hair forms against his collarbones still make him an enticing visual reprieve from the island's ravaged landscape. The Midnighter keeps thinking about that sound, the sleep sound, about it reverberating through his own ribcage, but he'll take Apollo on his feet and tackling a problem with him over that.

"So," Apollo says, "Metropolis or Gotham? Split up?"

"No," the Midnighter says automatically. "How resolved do things look in Gotham?"

"Pretty resolved. Lots of property damage in an area that looks abandoned."

"Metropolis?"

"Property damage in a populated area, no superpowered beings, and a big weird object I'd like to check out up close."

"And you're proposing we...."

Apollo shrugs. "Help?"

" _How_?"

"I'm sure we can both come up with something to do," Apollo says drily.

"Maybe you haven't noticed, Apollo: I have exactly one skill."

"So find someone to beat up."

The Midnighter opens his mouth to argue the point some more, but Apollo steps up close to him and the words die on his tongue. He just dragged Apollo bodily around half a mile of underground corridors without turning an eyelash, but it's different with Apollo looking him squarely in the eye, with Apollo smiling just a little—not his spectacular grin, but the smirk he uses sometimes during briefings, or when he catches the Midnighter's eye from the other end of a room. It's different with Apollo running his hands up the Midnighter's sides and hooking them under his arms. Apollo lifts him into the air, and he offers no resistance at all.

* * *

Apollo drops him downtown, and he finds someone to beat up in under three minutes.

Metropolis is a mess. The power is out, and for several blocks around the LexCorp skyscraper, its upper storeys are on fire; the burning buildings drop glass and ash onto the streets, which are clogged with stopped vehicles and throngs of people. The Midnighter's first thought is _personnel_ , but no. These are civilians. He can look at this crowd and draw conclusions about ancestry, socioeconomic status, motivations; he has algorithms for predicting their movements, singly and in groups. He's never actually seen one before.

Turns out they aren't that interesting to punch. He comes upon two of them smashing the windows of a car that has been abandoned in the middle of the street, and just watches until one of them spots him, standing on the roof of the adjacent car with his hands in his coat pockets.

"Oh shit, it's the Bat!"

The other one is halfway in the car window and doesn't bother to look up. "Are you crazy? He doesn't come to Metropolis."

"Then what the fuck do you call that?"

"Good question," the Midnighter says.

His fight computer has never lied to him and never been wrong, and two humans in their mid-twenties represent an infinitesimal challenge compared to, say, a group of genetically engineered telepaths the like of which he's never seen before. He still has trouble believing the slow roundhouse punches it tells him will be effective against these two. They don't even seem to realize he's making fun of them with his blatant telegraphs and long windups.

"Wow," he says, and leaves them to sleep it off in the trunk of the car they were trying to rob.

Down one street he can see the plaza with Apollo's "big weird object" in it, bright with floodlights and swarming with military personnel; down another, what looks like a crashed helicopter, and the rubble from the skyscraper it eviscerated on the way to the ground. Apollo himself is a white-and-gold streak that loops from building to building far above him, jamming beams back into place, soldering girders, vaporizing falling glass. Ninety percent charge. Other people at ground level have noticed him; the Midnighter sees pointing figures, hears the word _superman_. With evacuation by foot more or less under way, he hasn't saved many lives, but he has saved _some_ , while the Midnighter has been fucking around with incompetent looters. Is that ... embarrassing? Is this a competition? Should he be stepping up his efforts, or searching this torn-open building for some unburnt office furniture to relax on?

There are almost no uniforms on the street with the helicopter: too many obstructing vehicles, too much shit on fire. It's as good a direction as any. He looks for a situation to insert himself into.

Less than a third of the way down the block, the ad on the side of a half-crushed bus stop shelter catches his attention. A background process has double-checked the figures in the ad to make sure they're really two-dimensional and not people. It takes a fraction of a fraction of a second, but it forces him to notice the ad, and he stops to look at it. Sparse, panicky foot traffic flows past him, people emerging from buildings in ones and twos and heading for greener pastures. Every new person who passes walks or runs or staggers at the center of a web of trajectories and calculations: torque, pressure, volume. Just in case he needs to reach out and clothesline one of them as they pass, or kill someone on the other side of the street with a fallen chunk of masonry.

The ad is for a jewelry store, and it features a heavily airbrushed young woman and man, kissing. He finds both of them somewhere between boring and offputting. It's been clear from the beginning that it's not just any man at all, though he doesn't think it's only and specifically Apollo, either. The list of men he's met and had call to look at for more than a few seconds is short, and it's Apollo's nature to eclipse people. Lamplight no, Stalker maybe, Impetus maybe. Henry Bendix: strong no.

They haven't talked about Bendix, except in passing. They haven't talked about reporting in. They were designed and built to do something and there is no evidence that they have ever done it, even on the one mission they undertook for the man who created them, who filled their heads with their grand purpose and how he would use them to fulfill it.

Apollo is, arguably, doing the thing they were made for right now. The Midnighter looks up again but can't find him in the sky, and has to fight the urge to abandon whatever the fuck it is he's doing here in favor of finding Apollo again and—his thoughts peter out. The couple in the ad are still kissing. The question of whether Apollo is amenable has never been relevant, because of a fraternization policy that does not apply to them if they don't report in. He can't tell whether it's reasonable to factor this into that decision. He can't tell if he's capable of making the decision without considering it.

"Batman?" says a tiny voice.

He knows it's a child before he turns to look. He knows how to kill her before she enters his field of vision. That's how he was built. The only surprising thing about it is how violently and instantly he rejects it. He slaps a hand against his head like he expects to eject the fight computer from the other side of his skull. Simultaneously and much more valuably, he purges all current scenarios, then generates a designation for her and adds her to his exceptions list before they can update. The ones for the other people on the street, the adults, spring back into being, but the girl remains unadorned by the Midnighter's particular brand of math.

It all takes well under a second. She probably hasn't even noticed. The entire argument with his own enhancements took a tenth of the time he ends up hesitating before he speaks, anyway. "What is that about?"

She either ignores this or interprets it as a request for different information than he wanted. "Do you know where my mom is?"

"That's...." He places her at about four, but on the tall side. She has a teary, smudgy face and a cloud of black hair. From where he's standing, he can hear or see at least a dozen municipal employees who are more qualified to handle this situation than he is. "I.... Where did you lose her?"

She points at at a sedan, abandoned in the exit of a parking garage on the other side of the street. The building has been peppered with flying debris, but is mostly intact. "We were leaving her work and we had to get out but then she tripped, and I couldn't hold her hand because of all the people."

So the mother has probably been trampled to death. "Well, let's go look," he says inanely, and starts across the street.

"Can I hold your hand?" the girl says from behind him.

He stops in his tracks. Jesus, he's unprepared for this. No unsavory substances on his gloves, so he offers her a hand. She takes it confidently and hugs his side as they weave between abandoned cars; he has the surreal awareness that she has much more practice at holding the hands of adults than he does at holding the hands of children.

There are no corpses in the vicinity of the sedan she indicated. It doesn't occur to him until after he ascertains this that he should have taken steps to prevent her from seeing them, if there were any. A shadowy postmortem presents itself, showing paths he could have followed and actions he could have taken to prevent her from establishing line-of-sight with likely places for a dead body to fetch up.

"She's probably looking for me too," the girl says, a little tremulously.

"Right." He tips his head back and listens. Metropolis' soundscape tonight is full of sirens and car alarms, settling wreckage, raised voices, the crackle and huff of frames. He has two-year-old satellite data for the city, plus what he picked up in the flyover on the way in tonight, and later, on the ground. It's good enough. Three blocks east, there's a knot of people and vehicles in and around the courtyard of a building. He caught a whiff of isopropyl alcohol on the air earlier, at the intersection: a street infirmary.

"Batman?" the girl says. He opens his eyes.

"I'm going to pick you up," he tells her. She nods solemnly and allows herself to be hoisted onto his hip. "What's your name, sweetheart?" It just pops out.

"Melissa."

"Hi, Melissa. I'm—"

She giggles and rubs her face. "I know who you are!"

"Right, of course."

It's such a short walk that he foolishly expects it to be free of bullshit. The window of the deli they pass was broken by a flung fragment of helicopter blade, not human action, and he's set to ignore the man inside it altogether until he hears the hiss, smells aerosol chemicals and paint. He adjusts his visual spectrum: first the vandal pops into high visibility, then the new paint job he's giving the back wall. Its content baffles the Midnighter until he steps back and looks at the sign. Ah. A _halal_ deli.

"Don't watch this," he says to Melissa, pressing her face against his shoulder. "And ... try not to listen, either." He works a shard of the window free of the frame, winds up, then reconsiders. His lines of sight aren't optimal. "Do you really have nothing better to do?" he says, raising his voice. The vandal pops out from behind the pillar that half-obscured him, and the Midnighter lets fly. The short glass blade embeds itself neatly in his cheek. It misses the major nerves and blood vessels, but there is still the expected quantity of screaming.

"When I come back in half an hour, I expect this place to be pristine," the Midnighter says, with his hand over Melissa's ear in what he accepts is a futile gesture. "If not, you and I will be having a sit-down discussion, in your home, about a hundred and one thrilling uses for an aerosol can."

"Why don't you have your batarangs?" asks Melissa, as he carries her away.

"That's an excellent question, Melissa." This seems to satisfy her.

The infirmary is where he expects it to be, and there's a surprise there for him: Apollo, just lifting off with a gurney hoisted above his head. He doesn't seem to notice the Midnighter, but it's impossible not to stop and watch him. When Apollo isn't carrying _him_ somewhere, the Midnighter rarely sees him airborne as anything other than a white-hot blur of impending destruction, which is ... well, very attractive, but this statelier flight is still enthralling to witness. Metropolis General is the nearest hospital, but he's headed—ah, toward Swan-Klein Memorial, which will be less packed after a night like this. He floats away like a dream.

Melissa has noticed him too. "That's not Superman," she says dubiously. So that's a proper noun, not random people on the street making a hackneyed literary pull at the sight of a flying man.

"Nope," the Midnighter says.

"But he's helping that guy on the bed?"

"Looks like it."

This block is thick with people, streaming toward the line of ambulances and police cruisers that demarcates the infirmary, or away from it. They give him a wide berth, mostly, though he catches plenty of looks, hears gasps or _Batman_ or _the Bat_. One cop locks eyes with him. The Midnighter quickens his step, because he knows where that look leads and would prefer not to be holding Melissa when they get there, but someone he takes to be the cop's partner steps in. _Not tonight_ , he hears.

Melissa's mother isn't hard to spot: she's the woman with the obvious family resemblance, having an argument with a paramedic at the edge of the police cordon. "Please," she's saying, "please, please, just let me go look for her. I know you're swamped. I don't need anyone to help me, you just have to let me go find my daughter, _please_ —" There's a nasty cut on her temple, surrounded by the near-infrared glow of a bruise. She is making an absolutely minimal effort to hold a compress to it.

"Ma'am," the paramedic says, "this whole district is crawling with first responders." The Midnighter can hear her holding onto patience with her fingernails. "You're one woman with a head wound. You'll do much more good by staying put than—"

She doesn't get to finish her sentence. Melissa spots her mother and cries out, "Mommy!" It's not even that loud, and in all the sonic confusion of this evening the Midnighter doesn't expect her mother to hear it, but he sees her back go straight and her eyes go wide. Maybe she's got unusually good ears for a baseline human; maybe it's some learned thing, some ability to prioritize inputs to so that Melissa's voice lands at the top of the stack. He has no frame of reference for this. He should probably not even be in proximity to people who do.

Melissa's mother shouts, " _Melly_!" in a voice that sounds like it should have hurt coming out of her, like the sheer relief and desperation and volume of it should have flayed her throat. She makes a game attempt to climb the paramedic.

"Hang on," he calls back, raising his free hand in a staying gesture. "She's fine, I'm bringing her to you, hang on."

She's crying by the time they reach her, and Melissa, previously serene, is too. She ducks under the cordon when he sets her down, and his job here is done. The Midnighter puts his hands in his pockets and exchanges a look with the paramedic, who seems flabbergasted. Time to go.

The mother's hand hooks through his elbow just as he's turning away. He looks at it, and she snatches it off his arm with a gasp. "I—I just wanted to thank you. I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't found her. Thank you so much."

"No trouble," he says. All right, _now_ he should go. She's looking at him oddly.

"I thought you had, um. Ears. Pointy ... on your.... I have a concussion."

"Hm," the Midnighter says, and stoops to retrieve her compress, which has landed on the pavement in the hubbub. She presses it sheepishly to her temple; her other hand is buried in Melissa's hair. "Tell you a secret," he says, leaning close. "I'm not Batman. Enjoy your evening."

He tosses a salute down to Melissa and walks away while her mother is still gaping at him. This place is wall-to-wall cellphones and he's been photographed several times, which isn't ideal; he cuts down a pedestrian alley to lose the eyes on him. If they're going to make a habit of this, they need to either work on his mobility or stay in contact so that he can get airlifted out of this sort of conversation.

The alley is taking him toward Big Weird Object Plaza, so he keeps following it, past cross streets and through airshafts. As of the datestamps on his satellite data, this whole area was high-rise buildings; now it's a big flat space also containing some water features and quite a lot of fresh rubble. The weird object looks suspiciously like a spacecraft with a couple of big holes in it, surrounded by the remains of a containment tent. If he doesn't miss his guess, Metropolis turned the site of its crash into a park and got a superpowered entity fight downtown for its trouble. Somebody had better get fired for this.

The craft is to his right, harshly lit with floodlights and crawling with people in BDUs. From his left comes a running figure—a woman with one shoe missing, winded and sobbing a little at the end of each exhalation. She's headed for the craft or, more likely, hoping for help from the people around it.

"Excuse me," he says. She hasn't noticed him, standing in a shadow under a spindly tree in the darkness of a city blackout, but she rounds on him fast when he speaks. Her pepper spray is already out; he holds his hands up, palms forward, and takes half a step so she can see him a little better.

"Back _off_ or I swear to God— _Batman_?"

Fuck it. "That's right. Who did this?"

"These guys back at my apartment building," she says without hesitation, pointing. "That old one, the brick one. They killed the firemen who came to evacuate us and, I don't know why, they're rounding everyone up on the roof, and they've got these weird guns that—" She presses the back of her hand against her mouth and takes shaky gulps of air, like she's trying to contain tears or vomit.

Metropolis is a damned interesting city at night. People don't give it enough credit.

"Right," the Midnighter says. "You got away?"

"I don't think they really know what they're doing," the woman says, but seems more terrified by this than contemptuous. "There's a lot of us, and I got to a fire escape and, you know."

A fire escape. Perfect. "Okay. Those uniforms will take care of you. I'm going to check out your building."

"Give them hell," she snarls, then looks taken aback with herself. "And, um, thanks?"

He'd venture to say that Apollo, a man over six feet who wears nearly head-to-toe white, is actually stealthier than he is, just by dint of being able to fly. Still, he can hear a conversation happening on the roof, so he's as quiet as the ancient, rattly fire escape permits.

"Don't fucking _play_ with it!" someone's saying, as he gets close enough to make out the words.

"What, you're not curious?"

"Of course I'm fucking curious. What I'm not curious about is what it looks like when you blow your hand off with some sort of ghost gun." That one's prowling at the edge of the roof; the other is stationary, a ways back from it. Most of the fifty or so people up there are clumped together near the center. There's a general susurration of distress: breathing that is too fast or hitches with fright, soft rapid conversations, one or two people outright crying.

"He was a robot," the second voice says.

"I'm pretty sure robots don't turn into clouds and fly away, man."

"They do if they're _nanites_."

"Oh Christ. Please stop reading _Wired_."

As he rounds the last switchback of the fire escape, the Midnighter catches a weird smell: flesh that's been charred but—worse. He can't identify it. No one's acting as injured as that smell suggests, which means at least one corpse.

"And ghosts don't make trash cans into guns," the second one presses. "Look, okay, how about this. He comes back for his ... you know, these people, we just ask. He wants a 'long and fruitful' relationship, he'd better be willing to answer simple questions. And then you give me twenty dollars because I'm right."

"That's not how betting—"

"Both of you, shut the fuck up," says a voice that's quieter, but clearer. This one's sitting on the parapet, surveying the city. Older, male. "And shut _him_ up, I'm sick of the blubbering."

"Sorry, Bruno," mutters the _Wired_ reader, at the same time a new voice says, "Quiet already." This is followed by the sound of one of the hostages being pistol-whipped. It doesn't actually make anything quieter: there are a couple of muffled screams, a new wave of weeping and begging.

All right, the Midnighter's heard more than enough. He vaults the parapet and takes advantage of the three or four seconds of frozen shock his arrival engenders to break some teeth. This Bruno and his flunkies are wearing bad suits and holding blocky weapons, beam projectors of some kind, that do indeed have the seamless appearance that suggests fabrication by nanites or three-dimensional printer. His fight computer provides him with lines of fire and starts spinning probabilities. This is going to be very mildly interesting.

"Let's be clear," he says, tossing the flunky with the broken teeth—and, oops, jaw—to the ground. "I'm about to beat you into new shapes. Your fancy weapons are worthless here. I've already fought this fight. I've run it from a million angles and I know a thousand ways to win it. But there's a question that's been bugging me, so whichever one of you ambulatory pustules gives me a satisfactory answer gets to live the longest.

"Who the fuck is Batman?"

* * *

Apollo finds him on the roof of a building across the street, watching a SWAT team mop things up. Nanite robot ghost has yet to show, maybe scared off by all the activity; he's still not sure what its angle or point of origin is. The sun is just starting to flirt with the eastern sky.

He's drinking a cup of coffee he made in one of the offices he passed on the way to the roof of this building. He offers the other mug to Apollo, whose eyes land on the strip of skin between the Midnighter's cuff and his glove. That's normal; Apollo's been doing that since the Midnighter received his field uniform and that strip of skin came into existence. It's probably just the color contrast.

Or.

"I see you found something to do after all," Apollo says, reaching for his coffee, and then, "Hey—" when the Midnighter withdraws it just before his fingers connect. He steps forward, chasing it, and the Midnighter steps forward as well, until they're so close he can feel the intake of breath when Apollo realizes what's going to happen, just before the Midnighter kisses him.

He does know how to kiss. That's been one of the big questions of the last hour. He could rattle off the prevailing cultural attitudes toward homosexuality in every country on Earth in alphabetical order, but he has no idea whether he personally has ever touched a man, or anyone at all, in this capacity. Imagination and memory have both failed him in his attempts to conjure the motions, the sensations. But he must have done it before, because what little of his body is still actually body knows how to kiss Apollo.

And, oh God, Apollo knows how to kiss him back. He tastes like he smells, sharp and strange with the chemical tang of his altered biology. His arms close around the Midnighter and the sound he makes, oh, the sound; it makes the Midnighter want to bite his beautiful mouth, and when he does, Apollo makes the sound again. The Midnighter clutches at him without finesse, trying to pull him somehow even closer, to erase the last distance between their bodies; he hears Apollo's grip pop a stitch in his coat. They're a feedback loop, they are escalating, and if they don't stop the Midnighter is going to climb Apollo's body and then the two of them together are going to break this building.

He pulls away. For an instant he can't, but then Apollo realizes what he's trying to do and releases him. The nose of his mask has left an indentation in Apollo's cheek that rapidly disappears. Ridiculously, he's still holding Apollo's mostly unspilled cup of coffee; for lack of anything better to do, he holds it out, and Apollo takes it, looking equally nonplused. They're both winded for no reason. They're superhumans, for pity's sake. The Midnighter has two hearts and neither of them have pounded like this at any previous point tonight.

"All right," he says, holding his hands up. "Here's what I've got."

"What you've ... got?"

"In 2008, Henry Bendix plugs some experimental equipment into his brain and has a vision of what he believes to be a cross-section of the multiversal stack. He discovers several new technologies, which was the goal, but he also witnesses the defeat of an extinction-level threat on an alternate Earth, by a group of superpowered beings."

"Yeah, I—I know. I came out of the same lab you did. Are we not going to address what just happened?"

"I'm getting to it. Nothing like these beings exists, so Bendix hodge-podges a lab together from his new technologies and a huge amount of what we can assume is stolen funding, and creates them. Because a threat like that may exist here too, and because he can, frankly."

"Is this a _debrief_? Are you making some sort of elaborate pun, because if so—"

"What Bendix saw was the future," the Midnighter concludes. "Our Earth, sometime in the next few years. And when the superhumans he saw started popping up on their own, he shifted his focus and we became surplus to requirements. That would be about six months before the Cadmus mission."

"Well, that's a characteristically awful thought," Apollo says. Then he gets it. He pinches the bridge of his nose, sighs, and finally brings his mug to his mouth. He can't drink, but he's always liked the smell of food, and he seems to get something out of the pantomime. "People kept calling me Superman, or _hey, you aren't Superman_. I thought it was a horrible Nietzsche thing, but it makes sense that it's someone's callsign."

"What I'm hearing is flight, strength, energy projection, claims to be an extraterrestrial. He had a big sloppy fight with some other aliens here last year." The Midnighter points out over the park.

"So I'm a disposable copy of an alien."

"That's ... not how I'd put it."

"Of course _you_ wouldn't. What about you?"

"Oh, you'll like this. Batman."

Apollo almost splashes coffee into his face. "Like a military valet?"

"Like a man in a bat costume."

The hand Apollo puts over his mouth doesn't do much to hide his amusement. "Go on."

"Laugh it up. I wonder if Cadmus would put me back on ice if I asked."

"I'd be lonely," Apollo says, which brings the Midnighter's train of thought to an abrupt halt. Apollo looks immensely pleased with himself. He sets his mug down on the parapet next to the Midnighter's, and takes his hand; his thumb lands on the inside of the Midnighter's wrist, on that strip of skin he's been watching for so long. No one's ever been as aware of the texture of a glove as the Midnighter is now.

"I just want to make sure you have all the data," he says, looking at their hands, at his hand in Apollo's hand. His voice is steady as a rock.

"About...?"

"About our situation, so you can make an informed decision."

"That's very conscientious of you. _What are you talking about_?"

"We can't play it by ear indefinitely. At some point we have to decide whether we're reporting in, and if we aren't, what that means."

"Of course we're not going to _report in_. Henry Bendix feeds us a line about sacrificing our old selves to make the world better and then throws us away, and you ask me—" Apollo's eyes narrow. "Have _you_ been thinking about—"

"Not at all."

"What if _I_ did?"

"Yes."

The Midnighter drops the word into the conversation like a stone and watches Apollo go still. His white eyelashes make his face look rimed with frost. God damn Henry Bendix for making him so impossibly lovely. Or maybe that's just the Midnighter; for about six months he had assumed it was deliberate, a mechanism for creating team cohesion by riveting all of their attention on him every time he entered a room. Then he had learned that Amaze couldn't stand Apollo and Stalker wasn't attracted to humanoids.

"I was asking what you'd do," Apollo says carefully, "not if you'd come with me."

"Shit," the Midnighter says, looking over the parapet.

"Well, don't throw yourself off the—"

"No," he says, pointing at the building he's been watching, "nanite fabricator cloud bastard is back." There's a burst of automatic weapons fire from a couple of SWAT officers who are not prepared or equipped for this. "Armed some regular human bastards and had them rounding up civilians in the confusion, probably for the carbon compounds and because it's an asshole. Give me twenty minutes."

Apollo's hand tightens around his wrist, rendering him essentially helpless for multiple reasons. He's not completely sure he could win a fight against an alert and fully powered Apollo, and he hasn't checked. "I'll take care of it. You—" Apollo pokes the insignia on the Midnighter's chest for emphasis—"stay put." He doesn't let go of the Midnighter before he lifts off, and the Midnighter doesn't raise an objection, just lets Apollo take his hand with him until both their arms are fully extended. Apollo relaxes his grip and the Midnighter's hand slips from it with what feels like extraordinary slowness; their fingertips hook together for an instant before they part. It takes maybe a second.

It takes five more for Apollo to hop across the street, but by the time he gets there the fabricator cloud has finished pouring itself into the mouths of two of the SWAT officers and begun fusing them into something grotesque. It tries to attack Apollo despite its obvious confusion as to whether it wants to shoot him or bite him; he incinerates it. The Midnighter pours half of Apollo's coffee into his own mug and watches with his elbows on the parapet while Apollo chases down the rest of the cloud with bursts of plasma from his eyes. They're so hot the Midnighter can feel it from here, when the breeze is right.

"I got you something," Apollo says when he returns, tossing him a walnut-sized chunk of metal. It's still warm, pebbly on one side from the concrete it solidified on.

The Midnighter holds the slag up to the light and cycles his eyes. Even welded together, its component robots are complex and repellently counterintuitive, like they were devised by an intellect so unlike his own that its products are unpleasant to look at. And which, furthermore, is an asshole. "I would love to know who designed this and whether I can get all of their skin off in one piece," he says, and pockets it.

"Did you drink my coffee?"

"If you reported in, I'd go with you. But please don't."

"Oh, we're talking about this now? No instructional slideshow first? No catastrophizing?"

"You're essential to me and I don't want to be without you, ever."

"Oh," Apollo says. He puts his mug down again, gently, and grins out at the Metropolis skyline. Now that he's landed, his energy reserves tick upwards ever so gradually in the dawn light, a glow only the Midnighter can see. "There are much less difficult ways you could've said that."

"I don't know what this is going to look like, practically speaking."

"I have some ideas," Apollo says, reaching up to touch the Midnighter's lapel.

"We have plausible deniability for tonight. Now we have to figure out whether we intend to vanish or if this type of engagement remains on the table."

"That's not what I meant," Apollo breathes, and nuzzles under the Midnighter's jaw until he finds the place where cowl and bodysuit meet. There's only a gap there when the Midnighter tilts his head back or turns it a certain way, and he has limited interest in mirrors, so it's almost never in his field of vision. But Apollo has noticed, he has chased down another of the brief excerpts of the Midnighter that are exposed to the light, and now his mouth is on it—his open lips and his breath and his _teeth_ , and he has hooked his fingers into the neck of the Midnighter's uniform and is pulling it down, widening that gap.

His other hand is still on the Midnighter's lapel; the Midnighter gropes for it and shoves it beneath, past where his bodysuit ends at the shoulder, to the bare skin of his arm. Apollo goes him one better and pushes the Midnighter's coat off his shoulder altogether, until he's bare to the elbow. It's just his arm, of all things, but the breeze nips him and Apollo traces a vein down his biceps with fingers deliciously hotter than human body temperature, and he is ravenous for it; Apollo's thumb finds the crook of his elbow, and the Midnighter makes a completely involuntary noise. He puts his hands on Apollo, on the architecture of leg and hip and the curvature of neck and ear that he's looked at a thousand times without touching, and when he digs his fingers in, Apollo shivers and presses him up against the parapet and kisses his mouth again. He still has two fingers in the Midnighter's collar, and the friction of Apollo's knuckles against his Adam's apple every time his throat works keeps him breathtakingly conscious of that patch of skin.

He had imagined his systems would be silent on this subject. He is operating well within tolerances and there's no one close enough to rouse his fight computer. It should just be him and Apollo, and the Midnighter's perilously human skin, begging to be touched. But closing his eyes does not shut out the slowly mounting glow of Apollo's solar storage organs, and when he holds Apollo's face in his hand he feels the fizzing of synapses, smells the chemicals of social bonding and lust; and his skin, not the human disguise of a machine at all but part of a whole of which no element can get enough of Apollo, responds with prickling sweat and desperate animal yearning.

It's Apollo who breaks away this time. He just looks at the Midnighter for a moment, then rests their foreheads together; they breathe each other's air. "Also, the answer is obviously the second one," he says. "You get bored so easily."

The Midnighter's not used to smiling for reasons unrelated to violence. Feels weird. Apollo kisses the corner of his mouth.

"We have an audience," the Midnighter says, throwing a thumb over his shoulder. He can't look without turning away from Apollo, so fuck that, but he can hear the remaining members of the SWAT team, and now a biohazard crew that must have split off from the ones around the spacecraft. Reluctantly, he shrugs his coat aright.

"We should go before we end up on a tabloid cover," Apollo says, and puts his arms around the Midnighter again. "Do you have anywhere in mind?"

"Somewhere private. I need to get those gloves off you."

"That's the most sensible thing you've ever said to me," Apollo says, and bears him away into the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't thank [TKodami](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami) and [Liodain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain) enough for their support and cheerleading, or [affablyevil](http://archiveofourown.org/users/affablyevil) and [zeitheist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitheist) enough for alpha/beta reading. Any remaining errors are my own. 
> 
> If reblogging's your thing, you can do that [here](http://thetrollingchaos.tumblr.com/post/152073193433/first-response-apollomidnighter-116k-words-dc).


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